30. Why is hybrid working an inclusivity issue?

Brandon M 0:05

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the operations room a podcast for CEOs. I am Brandon Mensa. And as always joined by my lovely, amazing co host at 830. In the morning, Bethany airs, how are things going, Bethany?

Bethany 0:20

They're going slowly because it's 830 in the morning.

Brandon M 0:23

I know, I know. It's like you've just woken up, I can see that. And the

Bethany 0:28

thing is, is I'm actually a morning person. So I've been up since about six, just in bed doing my crossword puzzle. All my other word puzzles thanks to the New York Times lounging about watching my husband get dressed and rushed around watching my child to get dressed. And

Brandon M 0:45

I like that. It's like a relaxed lifestyle. Everyone's rushing around your to say, you know, I'm doing a crossword puzzle on blocks in here.

Bethany 0:51

Yeah. But because of that I'm running late. You know, and I'd love to be able to blame it on Oh, morning time such a rush. But really, it's just me being slow.

Brandon M 1:00

That's what you do at work, right? Oh, the commute the commute was terrible today.

Bethany 1:06

It was like another crossword puzzle is really hard.

Brandon M 1:10

Later, really difficult, challenging words today, I'm not quite sure why. So

Bethany 1:13

I guess that kind of brings us to a bit of a segue to today's episode, in a roundabout way, because we partially it's also just the joys of not having a full time job for me at the moment means that I can lounge a bed for hours doing crossword puzzle.

Brandon M 1:31

Everyone's dream, yeah, enjoy

Bethany 1:33

my life. But then you did talk about commuting. And there is always this talk of hybrid working versus office working. And you know, what is work? What is life? How do we do it all? Things I've been contemplating a lot recently. And so one of the things that's come up is hybrid working versus remote working and whether or not it's an inclusion issue. This is been on my radar for a while there was a McKinsey lean in report on like the state of work for women that came out last year, I think there's a new one this year that I haven't read. And in the one last year, it was sobering reading. It wasn't just about like women in the workplace, we're not getting promoted as often as men, or were like, systematically underrated for our ability to do our jobs, and then actually outperform our male colleagues alike. All of that is old news. The new news for me was around, particularly women who are dealing with intersectional issues, so ethnicity, or sexuality or disabilities, and then their great need and preference to stay at home, because they're not being exposed to nonstop microaggressions and discrimination all day long. And reading some of their comments are just heartbreaking. And it's like, I can handle my job, if I'm working from my house, because then I'm only interacting with my colleagues on a screen for a set period of time. And when I'm not interacting with my colleagues, I can build resources and resilience back for the next interaction. So I think these issues have always been around but pre hybrid working or remote working, you just accepted it all the time. And then having during COVID, some respite has meant that a lot of people realise I can't go back, I don't want to go back to that full time issue, and the full time experiences. So anyhow, with that backdrop of thoughts in my mind, I was on a email group stream a couple months ago, and somebody was asking about advice for hybrid working. And some people at work, were saying it was an inclusion issue. And this person wasn't quite sure what to do, how to resolve it, like they have hybrid working, but it was like set days, and some people waited in with I don't understand why hybrid working is an inclusion issue. I got very angry. I didn't opt to engage in a social media trolling massive debate way because I didn't feel like that would be appropriate or helpful. But what it did was make me talk to a lot of people to vent about how I was feeling and, and I can just like some of my reasons why I believe beyond what I just said about the report that hybrid working and remote working or an inclusion issue is also women disproportionately have the burden of child care and elder care. Me and watching my husband run around with the child is an exception. Normally the women are the ones running around and the men are just walking out the door. So you have to be able to be flexible for childcare changing, moving having to go and help elders etc. And so being able to have that flexibility at work is definitely something that that is a inclusion issue, then there's the microaggressions. And what might be going on in your environment, that means that people find it very difficult to be in the office regularly. And then on top of that, the argument is to like, should you have a set number of days that everybody goes in the same days that we all see each other? It makes a lot of sense for most people. And like, there's a lot of logic behind it, yes, the whole group should be in together. But as women, there could be underlying health issues that mean, you have your period, but your period is super heavy, or you have endometriosis, or you have debilitating pain. That means that and you can't control the day that you have it unless you're on the pill, that that Tuesday you're supposed to be in, you're actually incapable of getting in. And, yes, you might have a very inclusive work environment, and it's fine to tell your boss, but you shouldn't have to tell your boss like there should be a level of privacy that you're afforded at work. That means that if you can't make it in on a Tuesday, it's not an HR issue. But this is not talked about.

Brandon M 6:12

Okay, let me wrap my mind around what you just said. So hybrids and inclusion issue for two reasons. The first one is child care and elder care are disproportionately impact women, and mandated hybrid on Tuesday as an example, doesn't necessarily work because of that. And the second one is the underlying health issues that an individual might have, and your examples that you just threw out more things like periods and endometriosis, where we get a mandated Tuesday doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense. And what you're setting up in some ways is that this person inadvertently has to lean on their sick days, or potentially asked to share private information about their health with their manager, which they don't really want to do. And basically, in office mandated days don't work as blanket policies unless you consider things like this as part of it is what you're suggesting. So that makes tremendous sense. I think for child care and eldercare, frankly, for being honest, there's always been this unspoken pact in offices, which is, you know, as a parent, I'm in at x time because of drop offs, and I leave a wide time to pick ups. And if little Timmy has a recital, I either skip it, or I need to work from home that day. And you know, if the kids are sick, you know, all bets are off. Sorry, you're right. Disproportionately, this impacts women, for the most part, and for health issues, you know, if I'm being honest, it never would have really register the things like trades would factor into the equation. And I think this really is an awareness thing for people like myself to ensure that all factors are being considered from an inclusivity standpoint to ensure that we're making the right choices in terms of policies, but also that there's not preconceived notions that folks have are making assumptions about what's going on or not going on. So all that makes tremendous sense. Love that.

Bethany 7:59

I think the one point that I would just like to reiterate, because I see this quite often is a lack of assumed privacy. So it's like, if you have a health issue, that means that you can't come into work regularly, but you could work from home, that work expects you to have to share that. Otherwise, how can they make allowances with the new world with hybrid working the ability for remote working for technology? I don't believe you should have to tell work about your private medical history and experience. If men were the ones having periods regularly, and not the ones in power, would they want and feel comfortable explaining what's going on with their body every single month, and their medical history? And I'm just using periods like there's loads of other things that it could be. Okay,

Brandon M 8:58

so what do we do? What are the right policies? Do you think? Well,

Bethany 9:02

I think this comes into a lot of our conversation is going to come up with Brian about trust? And what is the new work environment? And can you trust people to do their jobs if you can't trust them to do their jobs? What does that say about you, and the environment that you've created and the people that you've hired, the world is different than it's ever been? We have new technology, the genies out of the bottle, we're never going to go back to the working world that we had pre COVID No matter how much you want to, and you need to accept that. Learn how to manage and lead in a new way. Learn how to trust, we're not going to go back to the way it was every single year. You have a new generation joining the workforce who only knows post COVID work, and they're also the largest generation the population wise, there's going to be a point where the memory of the office is a very far away A memory or the memory of coming in five days a week is obsolete. And it's a choice of what kind of leader do you want to be? Do you want to be a relevant leader? Who has the skills for this next world? Or do you want to hold on to the past and refuse to learn how to lead in the new way? I love learning. So I'm definitely in the former rather than the latter camp. But I think it's something that we all need to think about. And what does that mean? And also, as you can tell, I'm a fan of remote working and hybrid working. But that doesn't mean that I'm not also acutely aware of the loneliness issues and social issues around it. So I think it's an absolutely fascinating time. Where do we make connections? How do we make connections, how much of our connections are at work versus outside of work, the rise of all of these social communities, the rise of which actually, interestingly, are also online that like, where are we going to go analogue? How are we going to make connections and meet people? Because that still is very important for us, but it's maybe not through our work?

Brandon M: 11:00

Yep. So I think we are amped up, we are ready to go, we've got the right person to talk to, it's Brian Elliot, he's the co founder of the Future Forum, the author of The Best Seller how the future works, leading flexible teams to do the best work or their lives. So I feel like we're talking to exactly the right person. So let's flip over to our conversation with Brian Elliot.

Bethany: 11:23

I am so so excited for this conversation today. Brian is our first guest that I've actually gone out of my way to get in touch with. And it was off the back of one of his LinkedIn posts about why hybrid working as a DEA issue. So welcome, Brian, delighted to have you here today. Looking forward to speaking to a kindred spirit, I

Brian Elliott: 11:45

hope. Thanks, Beth. And thanks, Brandon for having me.

Bethany: 11:47

So we have a bunch of questions that we shared with you. But before doing that, I would like to share a bit of my hypothesis. My hypothesis has nothing to do with numbers, and I have no facts behind it. And so I'm hoping that you might have some of both, most of my life is just me pondering things. And assuming that I'm right. And this is definitely one of them.

Brian Elliott: 12:09

Well, kind of being in startups and being effective at it awesome. Exactly. Like

Bethany: 12:13

I have one vague piece of evidence, that's clearly enough. And so my hypothesis is that, whether we like it or not hybrid working, remote working, flexible working is here to stay, and that people will choose to leave their jobs rather than have to go into the office regularly. Therefore, as leaders, we have to learn how to accept a new reality rather than trying to force everybody back into the office because it makes us more comfortable. And every year past COVID is another year of a new generation coming in who have never known anything other than a flexible and remote working environment. And so if we don't want to become completely obsolete, and want to have our jobs for the next 20 years, we better get on board. Do you agree with my hypothesis? And if so, do you have any data to possibly back it up?

Brian Elliott: 13:05

I have tonnes of data to back up that hypothesis, a great place to start is just like the reality versus the headlines of what's going on out there. Some of my data is more US centric, a lot of it is global. Also, I co lead a group called Future Forum for three years, which did research on what was working and what wasn't when it came to workplace policies for people and we study the US, the UK, Germany, France, Japan, Australia, just to get kind of a global sense. But when you look at the data today, there's far fewer people coming back into the office than the headlines would like you to believe, especially in the US, the headlines are full of commands from CEOs to get people back into the office. The reality is there's more companies that are becoming more flexible than there are people going back. There's a group called Flex index that actually tracks like 5000 companies policies in the US. And what we're seeing that one is that about a 10% shift from full time in office into either hybrid or fully flexible this year alone. And more than half of all companies all companies have some form of flexibility in where people work these days. And the reasons why are you know, basically back to what you're getting at Beth, which is talent. As a company, as a leader. I've understood for years, that talented people working well together is competitive advantage, right? That whole culture eats strategy for breakfast part of it. But one of the things we found during the course of the pandemic is you didn't have to limit yourself to only the people that you could hire and convince to come into London, New York and San Francisco, all these things that we weren't sure we could do, which was true for me leaving a team at Slack, all of a sudden became available to everybody, which is I can think about much broader range of places that I could hire people from at Slack itself. We had this debate for a couple of years running about whether or not we would open up a remote team. And we didn't do it because we'd never done it before. But we got about three months into the pandemic and Cal Henderson our CTO said this is really working it And instead of sweating, how many people how many engineers I can hire into, you know, San Francisco, specifically New York, Vancouver, Melbourne, why not open the aperture. And once you've done that, and a lot of companies did it during the pandemic, there's kind of no going back. You know, the phrase is you can't unscramble an egg, all of a sudden, you find yourself in this position where your teams themselves are much more distributed in nature. Microsoft saw this, two thirds of Microsoft's teams no longer reside in the same city, let alone work in the same building. So doing all that means we have to also learn new techniques for leading and managing teams. Those techniques do happen to be more inclusive in nature. But I think we're at a stage now where especially leaders who are looking for that talent advantage are going to keep leaning into investing behind the management skills, the techniques that helped build good, productive, healthy, inclusive, hybrid organisations over going backwards to what worked in the 1990s.

Bethany: 16:02

Exactly. Sorry, it's just about the 1990s. But yeah, fair enough, because it's actually probably the 2015 as well, yeah, sorry, red,

Brandon M: 16:10

we have hybrid get it, that works tremendously well in all sorts of ways that I think are fabulous for companies, D and I understand that. And in particular, inclusivity, get that what's the cross connect between the two, we

Brian Elliott: 16:23

cross connect between the two is that flexibility itself is more desired by almost every group, that is the folks that have been historically not damage to work. So we did this in our research, I'll give you a couple of examples. 59% of working moms want to work from the office two days a week or less, that's versus 47%, of working fathers. And that data, you know, it's fairly consistent country to country, but it's actually strongest in the US and in the UK. Because in the US, followed by the UK, the infrastructure for caregiving is the weakest, right? US doesn't even have decent policies on a global basis. And so those types of issues are pretty quick to show up in the workplace. We see this in the US because we're able to dig deeply enough across race and ethnicity, to get at data that would actually show things like the summer of 2020. If you dial your head back, when we're first, you know, in the throes of the pandemic, one of the things that we measured was sense of belonging with my team. And we saw that on average sense of belonging felt that when we disaggregated the data, and in the States, it fell for white office workers, but actually it rose for black and Hispanic office workers, as well as Asian Americans. And when we dug into it, we brought in a couple of academic researchers who are professionals in this and Brian Lowry, a Stanford professor, was the first person to say, you know, as a black professor on Stanford's campus, he felt it himself because the need to be on campus five days a week, nine to five nonstop, is taxing. It's constant code switching, watching how he walks, how he talks, how he shows up. And the ability to work from home even a couple of days a week, the ability to dial in and dial out of that situation, up to recharge his batteries. And so we saw it consistently in the data. People across race and ethnic boundaries have greater preferences for working from home, you can see it also in hiring rates of people with disabilities, who often have a harder time getting into the office. And it's also true for neurodiversity to one of my co authors. Helen Cup is an introvert, like a major, great introvert, who, when you ask her to be the person who's doing the live on top of it, brainstorming, that's not her gig. And so she would much prefer to be able to think about something thoughtfully write out what she's thinking and then share it then being put on the spotlight. So thinking through how we blend synchronous and asynchronous thinking about how we blend in person time with time for people to be working, where they're most effective, but also taking care of their personal lives, creates a much more inclusive environment at work. And the reason why the two are at struggle right now is there are companies that are pushing people to come back four and five days a week. And they're doing that regardless of promises they made quite often. And those promises may have been made to people who adjusted their lives around the fact that they're going to have more flexibility. And the people that that damages the most are people who are historically underrepresented at work. It's women with children, it's minorities.

Bethany: 19:14

So on top of what you shared, Brian, it's the women and works report by McKinsey in association with lean in, that has a lot of this information from recent surveys, specifically around microaggressions and exhaustion and bullying in the office, and how people are able to continue to work in their environments, if they have some safe space,

Brian Elliott: 19:40

and the ability to not feel like you're continually in that environment from a microaggressions and a bullying perspective is a really big deal. There's also little bit goes to executive mindset also because I've heard senior executives and by the way, in terms of 1990s I started them right like my career started in the late 80s, early 90s. And so I kind of get the executive mindset. But if the executive mindset is, if you aren't in the office, how do I know that you're really working, and that damages this specific group of people, that's really damaging to your overall efforts. It's also just not true if you look at Kinsey, and lean in put out a study on gender differences just a couple months ago, and one things that it showed is that women who are working remotely or working in a hybrid setup, were just as ambitious from a career goals perspective as women working full time in the office. By the way, it was true for men also, this is not like a gender difference in that case. But we need to get past the sort of visual signs of activity, this sort of visual signs of hustle culture as the way that we measure people. And instead, think about how do we build systems that reward people on the basis of outcomes, not on the basis of showing up

Brandon M: 20:47

as a CEO, I'm very focused on outcomes, efficiency and culture. And in situations where I've got a periodically paranoid CEO, that is quick to attribute working from home as the culprit for Miss targets. And, you know, sometimes doesn't believe folks are working from home as hard as they would in the office. What do I do there?

Brian Elliott: 21:07

From a CEO advice perspective, one of the biggest areas to focus on in the first place is just how are we doing against the outcomes of the business? If your CEO is concerned that maybe we need to get people back to the office? Are there specific issues that he or she is seeing that are causing them to think that or if the outcomes are struggling? Why are they struggling? Is it specific to one team or one area? If we've got junior sales reps that are no longer hitting their numbers? Is the issue that they're not in the office? And or is the issue that they're not being trained well enough? Or they're not being managed well enough? Or is it indicative of some other issue that's going on? From a CEO perspective, that sort of productivity mantra can be challenging at times. But the main thing to do is to talk about what are the outcomes we're trying to generate? And what's it take to actually generate those? The other thing that I hear from people a lot at that level is what about culture and connection? Right? And how do we build that? And for a lot of CEOs who built all of their culture and connection muscle? By walking around offices and hosting all hands? There's two things that work. One is how do you help them understand that we do need to get people together, we actually need to fund you know, the quarterly gatherings for teams that help build deeper connections with one another. But also the CEOs themselves need to get into the digital tools where the teams are having social conversations, cultural conversations, connecting with one another, because one of the biggest gaps that I've found is that CEOs often are absent from the sort of digital town squares of their businesses, sometimes that slack sometimes that teams, but if the CEOs themselves aren't participating as part of that, it's not that people are missing them necessarily. It's just that they aren't seeing it, they literally are not seeing the activity that's going on. That all happens from a digital perspective that used to all be physical in nature. So

Brandon M: 22:53

I was mentoring someone who shared with me that their CEO ranted the other day, that with hybrid Thursday is the new Friday and that SDRs are at home, their nursing hangovers getting nothing done on the Fridays, one way of managing the emotional aspect with the CEO is to obviously go into the numbers. And in the case of SDRs, you can pretty obviously look at metrics like calls made LinkedIn activities and so on. My question to you is on the emotional side of things, because sometimes numbers don't have the impact that you want them to with CEOs in this case, what's a better way of managing the emotional side? Do you think

Brian Elliott: 23:28

the other thing that I found effective in this is taking the emotional argument and bringing it back around help CEOs who are in that position, understand the emotional aspect of it. So the counter to that, you know, people are going out Thursday night, and maybe they're not really working on Friday is to come up with a flexible work policy that says, you can work from home any day if you want to, except for Mondays and Fridays. And the instant you do that, we all get what employees do, which is they say you don't trust me. And when that happens, and by the way, most of these mandates are a signal that you don't trust me, the first thing that happens is employees actually turn off their brains. They start saying look, if that's the way you're going to treat me if the fact that I have delivered results for you for the past couple of years in a flexible work environment. And now you're countering that even though I've been delivering means I'm going to do the bare minimum, right, or I'm going to do what's necessary to fulfil my job. But you can see this in research that slack did this summer, for example, people are 30% less likely to go the extra mile, they're 50% less likely to try to you know, take care of a customer's need after hours, if they don't feel that their management team trust them. And so as an executive, it's really important to understand that what you're really trying to do is say to people, I expect you to deliver great outcomes, but I trust you to do the work wherein when you're at your best. And if you can do that you're going to enlist a lot more of their time and drive and energy than sweating whether or not you know they're going out on Thursday night.

Bethany: 24:54

Also the Thursday night argument always confuses me because I swear in the early Tuesday wasn't in London, everybody was saying that Thursday was the new Friday and I spent most of my Thursday's out. And then Fridays, everybody had to go in the office slightly hungover. Like, I don't get it. It just people forgot what it was like,

Brian Elliott: 25:12

I worked in Hong Kong in the early 90s. And when I went to Hong Kong, from the US, I was told these people work insane hours. And they did. And we were all young. And we would work in the office until you know, 10 or 11 o'clock at night after having dinner, but then we would go out until two in the morning, and no one would show up at the office until 10, or 11 o'clock the next morning. So, you know, it's just different habits and patterns that happen in different life stages as well. Again, it comes back to, you know, the anecdotes and the Tick Tock fueled stories are not really helpful. Can we just actually look at the data if we look at how we are doing and performing as a company. And we think about what it takes to get people positively in listen with us, instead of thinking that somehow by pulling out the yardstick of you know, how many hours a day is someone punching away at keyboards, that that's going to really, you know, move the needle on our business.

Bethany: 26:03

So I think that there's two elements to the resistance to hybrid working or flexible working. One is what we've been talking about the fear of nobody doing anything needing to control wanting to see that everybody's in the office. And then the other part is a combination of growing up being with people. And it's fun, and a lot of senior leaders actually enjoy going into the office because they don't want to hang out at home. And it's what we've always done. So I know how to do it this way. So I think some of this, you know, Brian, what you said around like, showing up in the Digital Talking places, I can't remember the word you used? What are some of the skills that senior leaders can use to get used to this new world and lead effectively rather than just lament that it's not the way it used to be? Yeah,

Brian Elliott: 26:52

I think one of the things that will help them is having someone else preferably more than one around the table that actually lives a different life than they do. Because you're absolutely right, Beth, one of the things that actually drives a lot of this is what worked for me, it's an application of back when I was coming through the system, this is what I did in order to be successful. Therefore, it's what everybody else should do, when let's face it, especially in the C suite, especially in larger companies, it's more often white male and older, and definitely not a primary caregiver. So getting other people around the table, who are in those groups, who are primary caregivers who are not white, who are not male, can help balance out the conversation just a bit at a group of chief financial officers sitting around a table once earlier this year, and about 10 of them, talking about getting back into the office and how they were excited about it, and everybody should be doing it. And I'm going going to come in four days a week, I'm gonna come in five days a week. And finally, it was all all men, one of them spoke up and said, I'm a divorced dad, and I've got primary custody 50% of the times every other week, and just let you guys know, there's no way I'm doing that I might be in the office three days a week, if there are needs for it. But on weeks, when I've got the kids, I balanced my life out that way. And by the way, I'm just as hard working as the rest of you. And everybody else kind of looked at him and said, Oh, man hadn't thought about that. And it was kind of a sad moment in some ways. So representation around the table is critically important. Because it's really hard to train someone to think differently. It's much easier if they hear it from somebody else that they respect, especially on their team. In terms of the skill set, it's a walk slowly into it type of situation, I joined slack in 2017, I had never used slack before. It's a very social tool, in terms of how people use it, which is wonderful. But getting used to that takes time. And it takes help. And it takes a little bit of coaching. So showing people what to do literally can be a big help. And once you do it though, you kind of quickly start realising that it's a much better forum for things like sharing a key message that you really want people to understand. Because you can do it in writing, you can do it short form video, and you can get reactions back off of it, which is a big part of what as a leader you're looking to do, then if you're simply sending out, you know, really lengthy email that nobody's going to read. So thinking about it from your job, as an executive is really about communication, we're going to help you understand how to communicate in different forums, because you've been told a dozen times that you know, you need to communicate in writing in video, and in ways that are interactive. Let me show you, you know, some new tools for doing that. They're going to help you, you know, bolster what you're trying to achieve, which is getting your message across. When

Brandon M: 29:43

you think about the work life balance piece that you've referenced a few times, what will be the top three policies that you'd recommend from a work life standpoint, to encourage more inclusivity as part of a hybrid format, in this case,

Brian Elliott: 29:56

the starting point for this and by the way, there's a lot of that in our book how the future work works that Sheila Subramanian and Helen cup, and I wrote now a year ago, it gets into how you actually build these programmes up and what we've seen companies do successfully. It starts off though with principles that are things like, we understand that flexibility is important because we understand that it unlocks potential for people as well as for us as a business. But we also want to create a level playing field and creating a level playing field, we're going to set out a few sets of rules. So one of the things that we did, for example, was we asked leaders themselves to model the behaviours they wanted to see in their teams. So slacks executive team came to an agreement that we weren't going to come into the office more than three days a week, that we weren't going to all of a sudden, be back to having the C suite meeting on the C suite floor in a headquarters building five days a week, all of a sudden, even though we said you can be flexible, people weren't seeing the evidence of it, right, they're feeling the pressure to be in the room where it happens. Matter of fact, we've been disassembled that sort of traditional C suite floor, and we gave executives offices, couple of them moved, which helped, but we give them offices in different cities in different locations. Second thing is thinking about, there's a lot of things around meetings that are can be really challenging in hybrid setups, right. So one things we did is encourage people to do, you know, one laptop per person. So if a couple of people are physically in a room and other people are dialled in, everybody should have their laptops open. The most important place to do that is where the power dynamics are the greatest. So almost every company has the weekly product review meeting, where the chief product officer or the weekly marketing review meeting, where the chief marketing officer is traditionally sitting at the head of the table. And there's a crew of people that are presenting whatever's on this week's agenda, which often includes people who are two, three, maybe four steps removed from that person, those are the ones that are the most important to keep a level playing field on. So one things we did at Slack, for example, is we left all those meetings virtual, there was never a conference room, even booked. And so that way, you didn't feel the pressure to be in the room where it happens. If you were the marketing manager who only got two shots a year at presenting to the CMO, you knew that you're going to be on a level playing field with somebody who happened to live in the same city as the CMO. And those dynamics are really important, because that's how you avoid things like, well, Jane showed up in the room. And so therefore, Jane, you know, gets extra either airtime or extra opportunities, because she happened to physically be there. And so thinking about how do you create that level playing field becomes really important. The third one is teaching teams to build muscle around becoming actually inclusive. Like how do you train managers on inclusivity, it's a really hard topic, but a great starting point are tools like personal user manuals, getting people to share out mantra should go first, what their own proclivities are, I'm a morning person, I am not a night person, if I'm going to do something off hours, it's going to happen in the morning, I'm much better at reading content than I am watching a video. And if you want to communicate with me, you know, those are important things, you know, for you to know, simple little things like that are good starting points to then start going deeper into things like who are you as a person? What are your goals and aspirations in life, and understanding sort of the deeper differences of where we came from as well. Those are great places to start.

Bethany: 33:17

I'd love that idea of the meetings, particularly with a bit greatest power dynamics differentials to be remote only. It does feel like there was and maybe still is a proliferation of meetings and catch ups. And there's not a lot of spontaneity anymore in work. And therefore people end up doubling up on a meeting plus trying to get their work done. Do you have any advice on how to not just rely on 21 to once a week for everybody to keep connected?

Brian Elliott: 33:54

A few of them? Yeah, part of this is meetings have grown and proliferated like crazy, the 30 minute video call has been the sort of be all and end. All right, we've just applied that everywhere. And one of the challenges with that is, let's just assume that I've got a heated conversation or something that I really need to work out with you. I'm not going to do it in Slack or email. But the thing I'll do is I'll look at your calendar, and I'll find a half an hour block of time. And maybe it's in three days, maybe it's in a week, because that's the first time it's available for both of us. And I'll block it for a really it's just a five to 10 minute conversation. A much better solution for that type of activity is just to sit there message you slack or teams and say, Hey, are you available? Let's just talk right now open up a voice channel, write a huddle in Slack, or literally call you on the phone and say Hey, we should talk this out. Solving the problem then in there and not being dependent on our calendars is the tool that's going to solve this is a great step forward. We also need to get much better at writing. One of the things that actually helps hybrid teams that helps flexible teams be productive is you've got to blend the asynchronous way The synchronous time, right. So getting used to the habit, we've all walked into dozens of meetings, where you then step into it, you've forgotten what the topic is. But all of a sudden, you're sitting there for an hour and 45 minutes of it as you've been presented at, you know, a pitch or an update or something else. And if we'd done it really effectively, people would have read the content ahead of time. And you could have just had the 15 minute conversation, but the meaty topic that you're gonna have. So discipline around this is things like adopting policies that are, here's what we're gonna do, no meeting is more than 20 minutes. And what we're going to do is we're going to send the material out ahead of time. And we're going to do one of two rules, depending on our culture. One rule is, you will read it ahead of time, because your boss will have read it ahead of time. And we're going to dive into the conversation. And the only way these things actually happen is if the boss regular reads it. If that's not realistic, and a lot of companies, it's not what you do, instead of say, great, it's a half hour meeting, the first five to 10 minutes is let everybody read the content, share it, turn off your video, or put your head down, read through the material in the content. When you're ready, turn your video back on. Now, let's talk. And I've used that successfully at SLAC. It's kind of similar to what Amazon does with the six page memo where you sit there quietly and you read it before you start the conversation. But then what you're doing is you're compressing the sort of death by presentation time into just letting people read through the content. And then you're getting into the meat of what you're there to do in the first place. So those are helpful, couple helpful tips to

Brandon M: 36:37

kind of cut it back. Yeah, I love that pre reads make tremendous sense. They have a huge impact. So here's a question for you. In the old world, you had your all hands and you had a bit of a captured audience, you could see everyone you could sense engagement, you had their attention. And this hybrid world or when you have an all hands on Zoom, you know, it's really no longer the case. I mean, what you have is three quarters of the company has their screens or video cams turned off, you know that the vast majority of folks are multitasking or perhaps not even listening, or at least not listening as he would hope as leader of the business. What do you make of that, and any tips on this one?

Brian Elliott: 37:12

Yeah. So that goes back. Brandon's great example of once you're totally sick of your message as a leader, that's the time that about half your audience has finally heard it for the first time. There's unfortunately no substitute for the fact you have to lather rinse, repeat in these things, right, which is that all hands contain some important content, what you're going to do is not only presented at the all hands, you're also going to share out that all hands presentation, but there's gonna be something it's a lot more important, you're gonna break it down into its component pieces. There were three key things we want people to come away from that meeting with, those three things are gonna be sent out separately as three separate messages. Also, they're going to be in writing for the people who like to read stuff. And they're going to be in short form video, meaning two to three minute what's the summary of it, doing that sort of breakdown of here's the three things we want everybody to take away. Here's Thing Number one, you can read it, you can watch the video, and a couple hours later or the next day. Here's thing number two, here's thing number three. That's the way you get to by the way half of your audience because let's face it, your average all hands had some cool events. I think the only thing that I've ever seen that was really memorable and an all hands was slack used to do intros of new employees. And Harold Jackson, who is our Investor Relations person did a standing backflip. Everyone who was at that all hands remembers Harold standing backflip. What else was said at that meeting, I have no idea. But that one was memorable. So the all hands is a great place to get people together to start that communication process, or to reinforce some key messages you've been saying. But it's only one step among a whole bunch of them.

Bethany: 38:50

Which is also just by plug for hiring an internal comms person sooner rather than later. We hired one at peak at about, I don't know, maybe 300 people and I was like, why do we need internal comms? And then we had somebody and I went, Oh, this is the best hire we have ever ever made. It's amazing. Yeah. Amanda

Brian Elliott: 39:11

Atkins was with slacks head of internal comms for a number of years and just fantastic at it. It's still one of my favourite humans ever, in terms of building culture and connection, especially in distributed teams. But also in a world in which let's face it, internal comms was easy when command and control actually worked. You know, when that was how businesses ran. Were a couple of decades past that. And so when you're at a stage where you really want people to be able to absorb and understand key messages, because you're relying on them to act independently on that right, to be creative, to be thoughtful to be responsive. You really need to make sure that your communication strategy is spot on. I had an event with a large company a few weeks ago, talking through a series of issues that they were seeing. There's 16 people around the table who are the senior leadership of the team they're really struggling on a number of issues of employees not understanding what they understood, and sometimes them disagreeing with each other. And I asked the question, who's your internal comms person? And they kind of looked at each other. And they said, we don't have one. So okay, I've only got one recommendation. Now this meeting for all of you go hire an internal comms person right now.

Bethany: 40:19

I have one question. Before we get to our roundup question, which I'm just curious about your opinion on hybrid working, where everybody has to come in on set days, versus hybrid working when you just need to come in two days a week or three days a week, what's your opinion, depends

Brian Elliott: 40:37

on the size of the company, if I've got an early stage startup, where people are generally regionally bound, meaning we have hired everybody around New York, around San Francisco, then a team level agreement, meaning there's only a dozen of us, a team level agreement might be that we're going to spend, you know, the same days in the office, because that's the advantage. But that's where it breaks down very quickly after that, once you start scaling an organisation and your past a couple 100 people, your teams are generally spread out across cities. And at that point, you're much better off figuring out like, what's a team level agreement. So you might have a group of engineers that are all, you know, regionally based and want to get together on a regular basis, but they might want to do it for one week, every quarter, or one week, a month, where you might have regional sales, people that want to pick out, you know, the two days a week that they want to be in the office together, because they want to hear each other doing sales calls, as an example. And so the needs across different functions very quickly, can become variable in organisations. And once you're spread out across multiple cities, saying to people, our rule is Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, are the days a week in the office to be with your team. If your team is spread out across cities, people are gonna understand that that's just sort of, you know, a very false rule. So, T Mobile agreements are gonna take you a lot further than top down fixed mandates. And

Bethany: 41:57

then also, as a woman, I would just like to add in the inclusivity element where if you have endometriosis, if you have particularly horrible periods, if you have morning sickness, and these are not things that you can switch off on certain days of the week, and you can't necessarily schedule when they're happening, not having to tell your employer why Tuesday is suddenly a very difficult day to get in. It again, turns it into an inclusivity issue.

Brian Elliott: 42:23

Absolutely, absolutely.

Bethany: 42:25

Awesome. Thank you so much, Brian, I could keep talking to you, because I have found a kindred spirit. So I'm very excited. But unfortunately, we have to be mindful of your time. The wrap up question is, if our listeners could only take one thing away from today's conversation, what would it be?

Brian Elliott: 42:43

I think the biggest thing still at the end of the day is giving people flexibility is important and helpful for your business number one, but number two, those benefits actually accrue to different groups very differently. And so thinking about flexibility and diversity as being two separate tracks in an organisation is just wrong, the two actually go hand in hand together. And if you want to build a truly inclusive as well as diverse organisation, you're going to have to think about how you provide people flexibility, and train your managers to focus on generating belonging and driving outcomes, not on attendance.

Bethany: 43:20

And one that we haven't actually gotten to is how do we train our managers on belonging, read your book,

Brian Elliott: 43:31

the book is a good starting point. I really think with managers, it's a lot of coaching and helping them along the days when your managers could all be just monitors whether or not somebody's showing up, or how many hours a day they're logging into systems are kind of long gone. Managers need to be really good at coaching people, and helping them grow from a career standpoint. And so one of the biggest things that actually advocate for is thinking about who really wants that, versus who's just looking for growth and promotions. So one of the things that I do talk about a lot is building ways in which you branch careers. And this is true not only for engineers, but for others that you can actually grow in a career and just be an expert track person. Or you can grow from the management and leadership perspective. But giving people the opportunity to move up a ladder, but choose which path they want to take. You really help you select the people who really do want to be coaches who really want to build belonging and teams who really do want to build inclusivity who really want to help coach people from a career perspective, as opposed to I'm just looking to get the pay increase and the job title.

Brandon M: 44:34

Alright, so thank you Brian Elliott for joining us on the operations room. If you like what you hear, please subscribe or leave us a comment and we will see you next week.